Supply Chain

It all starts with the voice of the customer.
You need to know what services are considered “the price of entry” and which are true growth enablers. You need to get your head around “outside in” thinking instead of “inside out” thinking. With customer insights as the driver, you can prioritize your supply chain efforts to win at the first moment of truth. It is all about balanced trade-offs. We focus on planning as the lynchpin to making the right trade-off decisions across a multi-functional work group. The goal is a successful sales & operations planning process that, as it matures, evolves into a truly integrated business-wide planning process. It’s easy to say, but hard to put in place and keep it running effectively.

Pain Point:I keep hearing buzzwords like “voice of the customer” and “digital supply chains” and “inside out thinking” – is there meat behind the catchy phrases?

You are right to be skeptical.
We do believe there is value in each of these concepts – but you need to be able to move from the concept to practical application and that is where we shine. We can interview your customers, separate the “price of entry” from the value drivers, and then help you integrate a few key choices into your strategic plan. We make the process experiential so you start thinking “outside in” as your normal mode of operation. When it comes to digital supply chains – think new ways to use technology to do customer sensing and segmentation and share demand and supply information seamlessly.

Pain Point:Are you struggling to make forward-looking business decisions through a plethora of daily, weekly and monthly meetings?

Focus on the future
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) processes provide great structure to the balancing of supply and demand. Executed correctly, they drive the vital trade-off discussions that drive sales and profit growth, while minimizing costs. But anyone who has implemented S&OP or IBP knows that it is painfully difficult to put in place and almost impossible to keep focused on the future, versus rehashing the past. Zinata has a maturity assessment tool that helps you determine what you are doing right and where you can improve. We have created accelerator programs to address the problems we see most often – the business trade-off analysis, for example. We also spend time on the fundamentals such as roles and responsibilities and good meeting practices. Why? Because that’s usually where it starts falling apart.

Pain Point:Are you drowning in inventory and still facing service issues? Or have you been shoving inventory down functionally only to have it pop up elsewhere?

Forget “either/or”, move to “both/and”
You can no longer afford to focus on either service or cash or cost. In today’s competitive market you need a plan to drive service up, while driving cost and cash down simultaneously. Most companies have a handle on their cost savings program, but they don’t have experience driving an enterprise-wide inventory reduction program that runs from the C-suite to the shop floor. We do. The Zinata Accelerator Programs help you conduct an inventory performance assessment and provides you with an inventory reduction checklist to get your program off to a fast, sustainable start.

The approach needs to engage all functions. Marketing & Sales need to engage on the customer segment service requirements and work collaboratively to have an initiative launch inventory target setting process that balances risks and rewards. A systemic, multi-functional approach to sku rationalization is another foundation technique to regularly review the right sku menu to win in the market and deliver your profitability goals.

Pain Point:Do you find it hard to visualize where you really stand on inventory? Are you struggling to figure out if you can safely reduce inventory and still protect service?

We know this terrain well
Zinata people have navigated this ground, and created a simple, but powerful tool called LETSI (as in “Let’s See”) to help our clients. It lets you see inventory in a way that is visual, straightforward and can accelerate systemic, sustained inventory reductions. The tool lets you analyze inventory to determine why it exists (its components and drivers). It provides a visual picture of inventory and its key components that can be understood and acted on by all levels in the organization. As a result, you can confidently take action, knowing that service levels will be maintained or improved. LETSI has helped thousands of people tackle this common problem.

Aligned in the war on inventory
We see an ongoing struggle between a corporate inventory reduction goal and manufacturing’s desire for high throughput, and the resulting long run times. But there is a way to make these goals compatible. Manufacturing plays a critical role in an enterprise-wide inventory reduction program too. The work starts with World Class Manufacturing Practices. Lean and TPM practices married with a high performing work team can deliver amazing improvements in changeover time reduction, defect reduction and quality improvement. Our success with clients has made us true believers in these secret weapons in the war on inventory. The marriage of sku rationalization and a Product Wheel approach to production planning can unleash both OEE improvement and inventory reduction. With strong, reliable operations in place, many clients then master the ability to produce to demand.

The supply network is the path to the consumer/patient.
A good supply network design flows from your business strategy and your customer segment requirements. It answers the questions: What to make and where to make it? How to distribute products and from where? Once it’s designed, you then need a way to keep your multi-echelon inventory model optimized through fast-changing circumstances.

Pain Point:Are your customers frustrated with your slow response to large and small changes? Are you living in a fragmented, non-optimized world after a series of acquisitions?

A hard look informs a solid strategy
It is tempting to jump into supply network design. Resist the temptation. We have a strategy alignment process to ask the right questions about where your business is headed and what your levers of competitive advantage are (or need to be to win). Our customer segmentation accelerator takes you through the steps to identify your customers’ service expectations, groups them into segments and then uses that data to design a supply network that meets or exceeds those needs. Sometimes it helps to conduct a portfolio analysis and a sku rationalization process to clean up your line-up before you optimize it. Then it’s all about crunching the numbers via a supply network modeling exercise and doing some options analysis.

We can do multi-echelon modeling that is so critical to the complex supply chains of today. The final step is to create an operating strategy from the category or family level down to the site level. Documenting your operating strategy gives you a means to guide your thinking when market changes occur. It guides those important trade-off decisions that come up in your integrated business planning meetings.

Pain Point:Do you have an army of people squeezing the last penny out of manufacturing expense but no one focused on the 30-55% of the cost made up by transportation and warehousing?

Pull all the levers
Let us put you on a cost reduction journey that pulls all the logistics cost reduction levers – even those that cross functional boundaries. Our logistics cost reduction accelerator program tackles each set of costs through a series of questions. For example, can R&D find a way to compact the product so you are shipping less water or air? Can changing the ordering guidelines to incent customers optimize a trailer’s contents? Zinata partners with companies that have warehouse optimizer and the trailer optimizer functionality.

Combined with an enterprise-wide inventory reduction program, you will have fewer overall materials and products to store and transport.

We thrive on solving complex business performance and process problems. If you’ve got questions or would like to discuss how we’ve helped companies like yours, drop us a line.